The invisible pink unicorn is the traditional atheist approach.

I loved VVVVVV. It was such a satisfying game.

Zeronet worked pretty similarly to how op describes. It was really clunky and barely usable when I checked out out, years ago. I thought it been abandoned. It turns out, relying on household grade internet upload speeds and having data spread across hundreds of peers that needs to be hashed and added to as people post is kind of inefficient.

The battle system and the bad desync issues on any multiplayer game longer than short-medium.

We definitely had those too. Shorter games were pretty doable, and to be honest all we had time for anyway.

I really liked the first one, despite its flaws. My cousin and I played hours of it. Excited to see what comes next.